Some people at the Department of Conservation did not want us to tell you about the Mokohinau stag beetle featured in this issue of the magazine. This is why we’ve decided to do so.
There have never been many stag beetles on the Mokohinau islands. A lone species has been having a rough time out there, clinging on, somehow managing to survive. Researchers have never seen more than 10 of them at once. The beetle is considered so critically endangered that, in the words of Auckland Zoo reptile and invertebrate expert Don McFarlane, “there needs to be a new version of the word critical”. Their plight is beyond critical.
McFarlane’s enthusiasm for the beetle is infectious. I first heard him talk about it when I was working with him on a completely different story. The way he describes the beetle, it sounds like a living marvel. It’s the crazy, far-off relative of the Geodorcus stag beetle family, the wild loner living on a rock in the sea. I wanted to see its knobbly jaws for myself. Then I wanted everyone to see its knobbly jaws.
Beetles are the underground workers of our ecosystem, part of the extremely complicated clockwork that keeps our wild habitats ticking along nicely. We don’t know what will happen as more and more of these species disappear. We have a whole taxon of Geodorcus beetles that dispersed across the country and became slightly different from each other, depending on the environments they found themselves in. We don’t know a whole lot about some of them, either.
McFarlane is still reeling from the results of the survey. They’ll need to go and take another look, but fellow searcher, ecologist Greg Sherley, is also feeling pessimistic. He’s looked for these beetles before, and found them straight away, at the same time of day and year as this survey took place.
Beetles take a long time to become beetles: they spend most of their lifespan as larvae, buried, usually in rotting wood. We don’t know if any larvae still lie in wait on the Mokohinaus. “We’ll never know for sure unless we keep looking, and keep looking long after I’m dead,” says McFarlane.
Sherley is worried that, even if beetles remain, there may too few to save the species.
Those at DOC who opposed this story did so because they believe publicising the beetle increases the poaching risk to it. But it’s a bit late for poaching.
The risk of theft seems like a good reason to start measures to protect the beetle. Though a plan for saving it has long existed, it is only just beginning to be put into action, and in large part due to volunteer effort. Ian Stringer and Greg Sherley, both retired from DOC, paid their passage on the survey and donated their time.
We believe it’s important to tell you about this beetle, that it’s special, and that it’s possible for you to advocate for its preservation.
You deserve to know that there was a beetle we could have saved—and that we might still save, if we’re lucky. You deserve to know that the cost of conservation budget cuts is paid in beetles. That species are blinking out around us, unknown, unpublicised. You need to know because you vote for these things. In 2009, DOC’s budget was cut by $54 million over four years—particularly bad news for those DOC staff who are enthusiastic about beetles and advocate for their protection.
If beetles are on the front line of the global extinction crisis, then entomologists are on the front line of budget cuts. Halting plans to save invertebrates results in the least public outcry, especially if no one knows they’re there in the first place.
Beetles need help, and not only from technical experts figuring out how to get them to mate in captivity. They need your help, too.

We’re increasingly stressed, and so are our kids. Their rates of anxiety have surged by 875 per cent over the past decade, and that’s just for children under 14. But there’s something that can help, and it’s free.
Nature is good for us primarily because it acts on stress. Earlier this year, United States science journalist Aaron Reuben tallied more than 450 studies showing a positive connection between nature and human health.
You don’t need a lot of it, either: a recent British study of 20,000 adults found that spending two hours per week in a park provided the same benefits as five.
But for those able to devote a weekend to the wilderness, nature appears to act like a deep-clean for the brain: people emerge better able to concentrate, problem-solve, and think creatively.
In other words, a research-approved remedy for our increasing rates of depression, anxiety and health problems costs us nothing extra. We simply need to use a resource that we’re already paying to maintain for other purposes.
The Department of Conservation is a health provider, and its land—a third of New Zealand—a massive therapeutic facility. So how do we get people there? How do we teach them about it? How do we help them use it?
These connections are starting to be made. DOC’s Healthy Nature, Healthy People initiative, a partnership with the Mental Health Foundation, is a step in the right direction—it’s based on the pioneering Parks Australia programme that saw the concept of ‘nature prescriptions’ spread around the world. But it needs to be scaled up a thousand times. It needs funding, support and other partnerships.
Then there’s Federated Mountain Clubs, its members overflowing with knowledge and goodwill, but facing an ageing membership and lacking connection with young people.
We need better connections between healthcare providers and the people who manage and advocate for our outdoor places. We need better infrastructure to help our diverse population, with its various needs, to access these places. And we need better information about how much our conservation land can help us.
Imagine if we designated areas ‘therapy forests’ or ‘therapy beaches’ or ‘therapy valleys’, and there was a subsidised bus that took you there on Saturdays, and once you got there, a track that was good enough for strollers and wheelchairs, too.
We can learn from the many successful initiatives overseas. In the United States, the non-profit Park Rx connects healthcare providers with park areas or non-profits that help improve access among groups of people who typically don’t go bushwalking or tramping. Community group Unlikely Hikers provides support for people living with disability to access parks, as well as people who feel they don’t fit in with traditional tramping clubs. Hike It Baby does the same thing for parents with young children.
We underestimate what can be learned and gained from time outdoors. On my way to meet the Rapsey family (see page 32), I hitchhiked to Nelson Lakes National Park with an high-school outdoor education instructor (the lack of transport between Nelson and its proximate national park is another story). She told me outdoor education was falling out of favour among students—the subject was perceived as a dead-end, as fun rather than useful, not the kind of thing that smart kids might do.
Nature shouldn’t really be an option, but a default, like maths, like English, like eating five fruits or vegetables a day. Nature is the environment that our bodies evolved to fit, not the cities we’ve made for ourselves. Nature activates our parasympathetic nervous system, the ‘rest-and-digest’ process that’s the opposite of the ‘fight-or-flight’ one.
Our bodies know it’s home, even if we don’t.

Everything changed on March 15, including the content of this magazine.
In the days following the Christchurch terrorist attack, two journalists who contribute to New Zealand Geographic, Anke Richter and Kate Evans, began reporting on the nascent aid response led by members of the country’s Muslim and refugee communities. Photographer Lottie Hedley flew in to spend a week shadowing volunteers and victims’ families.
We listened, and we waited. It took us a while to figure out what kind of story New Zealanders ought to hear—what kind of story New Zealand Geographic ought to tell.
It was becoming apparent to the nation that the Muslim community was one we had not, collectively, paid much attention to. Muslims are barely represented in newsrooms or boardrooms or council chambers, and we rarely hear their stories.
Yet through their actions in the wake of tragedy, the Muslim community has writ large the principles of the religion for all to see: grace, forgiveness, openness, gratitude. Anke, Lottie, Kate and I witnessed how Islam guided people’s responses to an incomprehensible event—just as it had long provided a framework, structure and routine to their lives.
Since the attack, New Zealand Muslims have been telling a story about this country that’s jarringly different from the one that the majority of us have been telling ourselves. These are the stories we have focused on in our feature about the Christchurch attack. We set out to learn: how has Islam guided people through life in New Zealand thus far—and now? What would they like to add to the story we’re telling ourselves about who we are?
This is us, we heard: well-meaning and friendly, a bit ignorant, not great at reaching out a welcoming hand, sometimes rude to women in hijab.
We can’t ignore the negative parts of ‘us’ if we want to turn New Zealand’s outpouring of aroha into genuine acceptance of minority communities.
We have to stop confusing unity with homogeneity. We have to recognise that sharing values doesn’t require conformity.
“When I hear people talking about New Zealand being unified and one voice for all—all that means is suppression, it means that in order to achieve that, you all have to be the same,” says Anjum Rahman, profiled here, who spends her time combatting discrimination and division, largely on a volunteer basis.
“What I don’t understand is why white supremacists are full of so much rage,” says Nada Tawfeek, who has lived in Christchurch for a decade, and lost a family member in the attack. “What happened to them to make them hate others so much? What injustices have they seen in their lives to make them this traumatised? We need to look at what the root cause of white supremacy is rather than just tackling the symptoms.”
As many people quoted in the story point out, it isn’t enough to not be racist—inclusion involves effort and discomfort. It involves getting to know people who might choose to exercise their freedom differently. Integration and inclusion are active processes, requiring participation from all. Like Haji-Daoud Nabi, we all have the responsibility to say, “Hello, brother. Hello, sister.”
Our refugee community is particularly good at this. In the wake of the tragedy, volunteers flew to Christchurch from other parts of the country to help. Many carried with them a shared understanding of trauma. One person featured in our story, former refugee Yobi Rajaratnam, arrived in Auckland five years ago after fleeing Sri Lanka in a people-smuggler’s boat. “Our dictionary is the longest,” he wrote of his experience as a refugee: the entries for ‘terror’ and ‘loss’ and ‘sadness’ are extensive. He flew to Christchurch to help others navigate their rapidly-expanding dictionaries: new emotions, new grief, new words.
By listening, we can tell a story about ourselves that’s truer. A story that doesn’t leave anyone out.

The science of human endurance is fascinating because it is so little understood, so variable, and because excelling at a monumental task isn’t simply a matter of physical strength.
“If races were really just plumbing contests—tests of whose pipes could deliver the most oxygen and pump the most blood—they would be boringly deterministic,” writes Alex Hutchinson in Endure: Mind, Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. “You race once, and you know your limits. But that’s not how it works.”
After 24 hours of physical exertion, it isn’t baseline strength that matters as much as mental fortitude, and grit is equally available to both sexes. The same weekend as the Revenant ultra run featured in this issue took place, a British woman, Jasmine Paris, won a 431-kilometre mountain race along the Pennine Way between England and Scotland. (Her time of 83 hours, 12 minutes set a new course record.)
Viewing the Revenant in person involved a lot of waiting on tussock-clad hillsides, but I was enthralled, fully invested in the success or failure of 21 people I’d only just met.
An ultra runner requires the qualities we most admire about the New Zealand psyche—they are proto-New Zealanders.
We value effort when no one’s watching. We value persistence over talent, and across extremely long distances, sheer stubbornness—call it bloody-mindedness—is what prevails. We value toughness, the kind that can’t be built in gyms or isolated by sports scientists. We value capability and self-sufficiency. In the Revenant, runners figure out a route across trackless land, face up to the elements, judge the time from the setting of the moon or the rising of the sun. They cannot receive any help.
“It comes down to the ability to keep going at any pace,” says Dave Viitakangas, who is on the cover of this issue. (He completed a full loop of the course, despite an injury.)
Ultra running prompts us to ask the question: how would we fare if it was only our mental strength on the line? The pursuit of that great reckoning of psychological fortitude is what draws people in increasing numbers to marathons, to long missions in the hills.
“When you are by yourself and you know that you are the only one that you can rely on, I feel like that’s when you are the sharpest as a human being,” said one of the Revenant runners, United States Navy SEAL Chadd Wright, in a Trail Runner Nation podcast after the race. “When you can’t look to someone else to have that courage in a moment of weakness and you’re by yourself and you know your only option is to rely on yourself—at times you can be sharper at that point than you would be within a group.”
Wright raced in a team of two, but the pair of them experienced a moment of intense isolation. Emerging after nearly 30 hours from a psychologically difficult section of the course, his teammate wondered about contacting the race organisers to let them know where they were. The realisation dawned on Wright: “No one cares where we are.”
Acknowledging it was a form of liberation: returning to home base was entirely up to him, and when he finally arrived back, the achievement would be entirely his. That’s the whole purpose of the Revenant. Here, the only race takes place within.
Sure, the Revenant has its critics—too long, too hard, inspires people to do dangerous things. And why create an event where you expect everyone to lose, anyway?
“If you’re going to face a real challenge, it has to be a real challenge,” said Gary Cantrell, the founder of the Barkley Marathons, a difficult ultra race in Tennessee. The Barkley has become legendary, attracting documentary crews, as well as news coverage every time it’s run, even though most years, no one finishes.
Cantrell started the Barkley for one reason entirely: “You can’t accomplish anything without the possibility of failure.”

Here’s a story: a naval vessel arrives in a foreign land, scopes it out, stakes a claim. Its crew is armed. They murder some of the local people and steal their goods.
We would usually call this an act of war. In New Zealand, we call it an encounter.
On October 6, 2019, it will be 250 years since Royal Navy Lieutenant James Cook first sighted Aotearoa, and commemorations of his visit will be taking place throughout the year. The government will spend $13.5 million on marking this through a program called Tuia Encounters 250, and a further $9 million will be provided for community events through the Lotteries Grants Board.
Using the word ‘encounters’ to describe the first meetings of British and Māori is a euphemism—a poor substitute for the enormity of what took place.
We need to find better words to describe what happened. We need to be honest about the nature of the Endeavour’s mission—to take possession of land and expand the British Empire—and the impact that it had. We have the text of the secret orders that Cook unsealed in 1769, after observing the transit of Venus near Tahiti. (In summary: “Go find Australia, see if it’s got anything valuable, and claim any islands you stop at on the way.”)
This obfuscation discredits New Zealanders. It treats Pākehā as though they are too fragile to cope with remembering the violence that accompanied British migration. Māori don’t have a choice whether to remember this violence or not—the ripples of it are still part of people’s lives. The bloodless word ‘encounter’ turns us away from what we have a duty to face.
When I spoke to Tina Ngata about the symbolism of the Endeavour, she pointed out that remembering Cook’s visit in this manner promotes a false sense of reconciliation and unity, and furnishes the idea that we’ve put all those misunderstandings in the past. (We haven’t—just look at the way Pākehā speak about Māori on social media if you’re not sure.)
Ngata is Ngāti Porou—her ancestors were among the first Māori to meet the British—and is a lone voice calling for plain speaking.
“Those kinds of truths really need to be told,” she says. “It’s not about attacking [Cook], it’s not about attacking anyone—it’s about telling the full truth of the project of imperial expansion.”
I’ll admit that it’s uncomfortable to imagine Cook as the tool of a military, to see his visit as the first stage of an invasion. I much prefer the story where he’s a hero—the story that’s all about daring and scientific discovery and exploration. That’s the one I was taught.
But this is an opportunity to recognise that we’ve only been recounting the Pākehā story for the last 250 years. I’d like to hear the one told by the descendants of the Māori who met Cook. But we need to quieten down the first one in order to listen.
As this issue went to press, Ngata was installing an exhibition at Gisborne’s Tairāwhiti Museum. It’s about Cook’s visit, from the point of view of the people who were already here, and involves art, performances, lectures and workshops. It’s called He Tirohanga ki Tai, A View from the Shore. It wasn’t funded by any of the government-sponsored grants.
Many of these event-organising bodies use the word ‘celebration’. But I think that to celebrate this occasion is an insult to the people for whom Cook’s visit was a harbinger of disease, disenfranchisement, and death.
We should be clear: the Endeavour is the backdrop for the opening scene of a tragedy. It symbolises something that we, as a people, never want to do again. The words we should use for its 250th anniversary are ‘lest we forget’.
Māori have a whakataukī, a proverb, that I think of often: Ka mua, ka muri. ‘Walking backwards into the future.’ We move forward, but the only thing we can see is the past.
We are not, as a nation, looking our past in its face. And we cannot take steps towards a unified future until we do.

We’ve all heard of moa, and probably the enormous Haast’s eagle, too, but there were a lot more giant flightless oddities running around the forests of New Zealand when people first stepped ashore, and it’s a mystery to me why we’re not talking just as much about the adzebill.
The adzebill was, as far as anyone can tell, a giant flightless killer in the shape of a goose. It had a formidable beak shaped like a pick, very strong legs, and probably weighed around 20 kilograms. We don’t know what it ate, but from its skeleton, it looks perfectly capable of running other species down, tackling and stabbing them—the All Black of the bird world, if you don’t count the stabbing.
I first heard of it because ‘adzebill’ is one of the online pseudonyms used by Mike Dickison, former curator of natural history, current professional improver of Wikipedia.
“They were just the most amazing skeletons, if you studied bird anatomy—super chunky and robust,” he told me. “They must have been doing incredible damage to something. And almost nobody in New Zealand has heard of them.
“To me the adzebill is symbolic of the gulf between what scientists know and what the public knows. They were one of the things you would almost have certainly encountered 750 years ago when you walked ashore. And any New Zealand palaeontologist—well, there are about six of them—knows about all the other things that used to be wandering around, that you were just as likely to meet as the moa.”
Have you heard of the snipe-rail, the owlet-nightjar, the musk duck?
How about the laughing owl, the wren that ran around the forest like a mouse, or the other giant predator of the skies, Eyles’s harrier?
New advances in DNA technology are telling us more about how these species lived (Kate Evans investigates six of them) but all deserve a better introduction to the public in the first place.
So it’s fitting that our story on recent discoveries about prehistoric birds sits alongside our story on citizen science. Citizen science is about the public contributing to research, but it’s also about removing barriers of access between professionals and amateurs, experts and enthusiasts.
These days, Dickison works full-time at getting knowledge that’s common among scientists out into the world—by putting it on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. (Yes, anyone. Including you.) Its accuracy is preserved by the millions of people who act as its caretakers—vandalistic attempts to introduce false information are generally corrected within minutes, if not seconds. Facts must be supported by citations, and if not, they’re excised.
Dickison recently spent three weeks at New Zealand Geographic, adding information from the magazine’s archive to the site. While he was here, he organised a group of experts and volunteers to spend an evening dramatically improving the Wikipedia page about kauri dieback, incorporating research references sourced for our story on the subject. (Creating a detailed, accurate Wikipedia page is something that the government agency charged with informing the public about kauri dieback could have done for free.)
Wikipedia is the fifth-most-visited website in the world—when you Google something like ‘kauri dieback’, a Wikipedia page is one of the first things that comes up—but we lag behind other developed countries in terms of Wikipedia’s coverage about New Zealand.
We live in a world with all the tools for more open and inclusive sharing of information, but many of the old walls between institutions, professionals, experts and the rest of us still exist. Let’s keep dismantling them.

I didn’t grow up tramping, and I started because of a Great Walk. Tramping had seemed like something you couldn’t learn about—you had to be initiated by someone who already knew how to do it—but the Great Walks simplified things. I picked the Routeburn because it had the nicest pictures of mountains. I thought 32 kilometres was a long way, and I didn’t know what to eat or wear or bring.
That trip taught me what I should have eaten and worn and brought. It taught me that 32 kilometres isn’t far, that walking all day in the rain isn’t bad, and that the people you meet in huts are some of the best around.
What I did grow up with was religion. As my devotion to Christianity waned, the time I spent outside grew, and looking back, I can see that they performed similar functions in my life.
I appreciated Christianity for the reminder, every Sunday, of what is essential. For the way it brought me face to face with my failings and my values. For the reminder that human connection is fundamental to life.
We don’t have a lot to remind us of what is essential, and tramping is about simplicities—only after 20 kilometres in the rain do I truly understand the worth of a cup of tea and a gingernut.
The outdoors strips you to the bones. It puts a dye trace on your failings and your values, and shows you when and how they emerge. It connects you with strangers—you can’t cross a fast creek in a rainstorm by yourself (and sometimes, you just have to wait).
In Alain de Botton’s book The Architecture of Happiness, the British philosopher writes that cultures create buildings, objects and art that capture qualities those cultures lack—light-heartedness, perhaps, or openness.
“We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them,” he writes. “We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need—but are at constant risk of forgetting we need—within.”
If we’re drawn to places because we seek to inwardly resemble them in some way, then New Zealanders need something about the outdoors. Our individualism needs a reminder of the importance of others. The artificial pace of urban life needs the human pace of walking. And we seek those reminders more often in the outdoors than in religion. Last year, more of us went on a day tramp than regularly attended church.
We don’t have Gothic cathedrals in New Zealand—structures that remind us that the scale of time far exceeds a human lifespan—but we have limestone karsts, coal seams, valleys carved by glaciers, and trees that were standing before the King James Version was translated.
According to a 2017 Sport New Zealand survey of 33,000 people, seven per cent of New Zealanders had been on an overnight tramp in the past year. That’s more than three times as many people as played rugby. It’s more than played soccer, basketball, netball, bowls or cricket. (Tramping skews male, and vastly more Pākehā take part than any other ethnic group.)
There are a lot of people who probably would like tramping, but are prevented by circumstance, or by the fact they haven’t done it before.
So I want a Great Walk on every other ridgeline. I want people going door to door asking, “Have you tried tramping?” I want Great Walks to be cheaper, and I want them to be nearer major population centres.
Two weeks before this issue went to print, I walked the southern third of what will become our tenth Great Walk. The track on the tops of the Paparoa Range isn’t finished yet—there’s only a poled route that would have daunted me a decade ago. On the tops are tawny alpine meadows covered in tussock, the ridgeline dropping away to the sea on one side, the Southern Alps on the other.
That morning, I crossed paths with photographer Neil Silverwood and his partner Lauren Kelley going the other way, returning from taking the final photographs for this issue’s story. (Lauren is on the cover.) At the end of the day, returning to Ces Clark Hut, I realised my friend and I were the only people on the range. And as the sunlight slanted low over the ocean, turning the tussock into spun gold, I felt terrifically wealthy, then greedy, that we were the only people there to see it.

Our towns and cities are lacking something important, and I was reminded of this during a recent visit to Hong Kong.
There, senior citizens fill the social niche that teenagers do in Auckland. They loiter in the local square with their mates, laughing raucously. When they exercise in the park, their music precedes them, emanating from tiny boom-boxes clipped to their backpacks. Each morning, I woke to their voices chatting in the street, three stories below, over their first cigarette of the day.
This is a city New Zealanders like feeling superior to. “We don’t want to turn into Hong Kong,” we say, worried about intensified housing.
But Hong Kong has something we don’t. It has elderly people hanging out in public, everywhere you look. Its residential areas are packed with spaces for people to meet, gather, and linger—squares, plazas, tea-houses, corner stores, tiny parks, giant parks, streetside seats—while ours are not. And we suffer for it.
Ray Oldenburg, an American sociologist, first noticed these places in the 1970s. Or rather, he noticed that European cities had them, and American cities didn’t. He named them ‘third places’, because your first place is your home, and your second is your workplace, but your third place is where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces and make new acquaintances. These places are cheap or free. They’re open to people from all walks of life.
New Zealand has a great third place—the outdoors. My favourite third place is a DOC hut, any of them—the one space in the country where anyone is up for a yarn. But I can’t stop in at a DOC hut on my way home from work, and neither can the other 86 per cent of New Zealanders who live in urban centres. Reading Oldenburg’s book, The Great Good Place, I began to wish for an urban equivalent.
“A community life can exist when one can go daily to a given location at a given time and see many of the people one knows,” writes another American sociologist, Philip Slater, author of a book on loneliness.
When a city has lovely spaces for people for people to stroll in, or loiter, or meet friends—and importantly for our senior citizens, when these places are close to home—then the requirement for one’s house to be large and nice enough for entertaining is lessened. And when you have places to meet your neighbours by chance, you can get to know them without the pressure of inviting them over. Oldenburg describes third places as neutral ground: no one has to play host and everyone is at ease.
“If there is no neutral ground in the neighbourhoods where people live, association outside the home will be impoverished,” he writes. “Many, perhaps most, neighbours will never meet, to say nothing of associate, for there is no place for them to do so.”
Why is all of this important? Because a third of us said we were lonely in the 2014 census, and one in five of us will seek treatment this year for depression or anxiety. And because our cities aren’t bolstering one of the most significant aspects of mental health: a sense of community.
Yet we blame this lack of community upon ourselves—we haven’t tried hard enough to build it—when the problem is in fact the lack of a venue for this to take place. It’s akin to wondering why no one plays pick-up basketball when there’s no court, hoop or ball.
As we rapidly expand our cities, as we solve our housing crises, we have the chance to correct this. We could shift away from the prioritisation of cars as a method of transport, and make our streets places for strolls and encounters. That means living a little closer together, placing useful things within walking distance, perhaps forgoing individual parcels of lawn for large, shared parks. When our third places are a drive away, elderly people are fastened in retirement villages, and teenagers stuck in suburbia.
We could treat the city as our living room, kitchen, dining room, back garden and sunny deck. We could value connection over privacy.
The tiny-house dwellers featured in this issue are bravely striking out for a new way of life—one where we value the spaces we share with others as much as the spaces we keep to ourselves.

We are lucky enough, in New Zealand, to have a bird which runs towards us rather than in the opposite direction.
We’re so used to seeing them as the local louts mucking around, leaving road cones in the middle of the highway for a laugh, that it hasn’t quite occurred to us how special they are.
“It surprised the hell out of me that no one was working on kea,” animal-behaviour biologist Ximena Nelson told me. “I haven’t tended to study birds, because in general birds are overstudied.”
She wonders if kea slipped under the radar in New Zealand—there’s a lab in Austria working on kea intelligence—because they’re so conspicuously smart.
“There’s an element of, ‘Why would you look at this? Everybody knows’,” she says. “We make lots of assumptions about what’s obvious, and when we look into it, it’s not.”
It’s hard to compare cleverness between species, because there are so many different aspects to it. But kea have quite a few of them: they’ve got social skills, which allow them to collaborate with one another, they’ve got a problem-solving streak, born of their need to extract food from hard-to-reach places, and they’re adaptable.
Kea are one of the few species to have taken advantage of humans living and tramping and cooking and operating forestry businesses in their habitat. We’ve given them numerous new sources of food, to the point that some kea now specialise in ski-field or motor-camp foraging, and have trouble finding sustenance when relocated elsewhere. We provide them with toys, like vinyl seats and solar panels and road cones, and they’ve responded by playing with them. There’s a poetic justice to the efficiency with which they demolish the human structures that have invaded their habitat.
The more I researched kea, and the more I watched them, the more I became convinced that many elements of our national character are innate kea qualities. We may think we’re original, but they precede all our best attributes.
They’re the mad geniuses of the bird world, experimenting with things just for fun—like the group of kea in Fiordland who were filmed setting off stoat traps using sticks. (They weren’t even retrieving the food from the trap—just making it go bang.) They’re self-sufficient, and have the air of being able to figure things out themselves—or failing that, with brute force and the multitool attached to their faces. They have little sense of caution, and don’t think through consequences, but they don’t do anything half-heartedly, either. We should be proud that they’ve held their territory so firmly, that they announce their presence so raucously and destructively.
Perhaps we could grant them space to recover their numbers, safe from lead flashings and stoats. We could adapt to live with kea as they’ve adapted to live with us—boldly, and with cunning.

One of the greatest mysteries on our planet is the capricious behaviour of the continent we arrived at last of all. Granted, Antarctica doesn’t look like a mystery. It looks like a blank space. It’s mostly made of water. It’s shaped like a child’s first attempt at a pancake. On its surface, nothing moves except wind, snow, and some of the least sensible forms of life: human beings attempting to prove something, and the comedy acts of the animal world, waddling to and from the ocean.
Yet within Antarctica is a complicated infrastructure built of ice, pressure, wind, snow, air and ocean currents. The entire continent flexes in response to changes in other parts of the world, and it runs on its own internal logic. We’ve learned that it has two settings: freeze and melt. Right now, it’s busy freezing. But at some point—perhaps soon, perhaps not—a shift will take place somewhere within, and its glaciers and ice sheets and ice shelves will pour themselves into the sea. There will be no foreshadowing of this. So it isn’t like the seasons. It’s more like waking up.
This reversal has taken place several times in the past, but because Antarctica was the last continent we stood on, we’ve only been watching it for a hundred years, and it’s been deceptively inert all that time. Scientists learned about its melting mode from looking at layers of mud on the seafloor, but the geological record doesn’t tell us what kind of invisible hand flips the switch.
Once, humans raced from one part of Antarctica to another. Now, we are racing to figure out the system that runs Antarctica, something we appear to understand less than deep space or atoms.
In this issue, we transport you to the heart of the Ross Ice Shelf, the largest platform of floating ice in the world. Underneath there is a dark, covered ocean we’ve barely visited, one of the world’s biggest blank spaces: the Ross Ice Cavity. It hasn’t had any concerted attempt at measurement, or understanding, for almost half a century. Beneath, in layers of sediment, is written Antarctica’s history. Within that, clues to its future.
Antarctica is difficult to talk about because there aren’t very many certain things we can say, and possibilities don’t make for good stories. Moreover, uncertainty seems to make people suspicious about science, that maybe the job hasn’t been done well, that the scientists have the wrong end of the stick, or maybe they are deceiving us about what kind of stick it is.
Humans prefer simple stories, even when they’re wrong. And we prefer to be sure, even in a world that tries to show us, over and over again, that little is certain.
But science works in the gaps that uncertainty makes. There is uncharted territory to be charted, whether underneath ice shelves at the bottom of the world, or underneath our feet in the soil we’re only just properly getting to know.
“In the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act,” wrote one of my favourite authors, Rebecca Solnit. “When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone, or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.”
It’s hard to tolerate complexity. It’s an effort to comprehend something that lies in many pieces and won’t come together to form a whole. But at New Zealand Geographic we know, and are grateful, that you relish the challenge of embracing large, wobbly, shapeshifting ideas.
Welcome to the 150th issue of the magazine. Over the past 29 years, our form and style has evolved, but our mission remains the same: to communicate curiosity, discovery, and a desire to understand.

How we perceive the world around us is determined by the language we speak. Language affects how we think of ourselves, how we relate to others, how we organise time and space, even the types of thoughts we’re able to formulate. Not all languages have a past, a present and a future. Not all languages can give the same directions or describe the same relationships.
For native English speakers, Māori offers a very different way of looking at and arranging the world. Here’s just one example: English has one word for ‘you’, but Māori has five. It is much more concerned with who ‘you’ are—whether you’re one person, or two, or many, whether I consider myself part of your group or apart from it.
The language is a treasure, a lens, a record of culture, a place where stories and poetry and wisdom live. It’s limited in translation by the narrower definitions of English words, and the fact that English takes ten words to explain an aspect of Māori culture which te reo can accomplish in one.
To keep a language, though, you can’t just use it ceremonially. You have to be able to say hi, talk about the weather, order McDonald’s.
Jeremy Tātere MacLeod of Ngāti Kahungunu is one of a group of people around the country working to create more opportunities to speak Māori in daily life. Despite recent and well publicised complaints about the use of te reo on Radio New Zealand, the vast majority of the New Zealand public want it spoken.
Surveys of non-Māori people conducted between 2000 and 2009 showed a rapid upswing in support for the language to be taught in schools and used in public life. In 2009, 65 per cent of non-Māori believed the government should encourage the language’s use. (In 2000, it was 24 per cent.) The change in attitude has been rapid; letting the language soak into public life will take longer.
It takes a generation to lose a language, says MacLeod, but three to get it back again.
One of the first things you learn in any language class is how to introduce yourself, but in Māori an introduction requires more than your name: it also involves describing where you’re from. Perhaps, one day, we’ll all be able to locate our childhood not just with the name of a primary school but with mountains or rivers or harbours, the immutable geographical features that stood beside us as we learned about the world and our place in it.
This different way of thinking came into focus for me during my research for the kauri dieback story. I look at rickers, young kauri, and my mind leaps to objects: lamp posts, masts. Others look at kauri and see members of their family. In Māori cosmology, kauri are our older siblings; we are simply the last-born child, and the living world is formed of our relatives. It is Māori and community groups that are driving action against kauri dieback.
What communities can achieve has come to the foreground during New Zealand’s most recent natural disasters, and as a result, there’s been a shake-up in civil defence thinking, as Charlotte Graham has found. We’ve long depended on individuals to prepare for disasters on their own—which means the less able and less capable get left behind.
Naomi Arnold also delved into future-planning for her story on robotics. Our population of retirees will overtake our youth at some point in the next 20 years—but how will we care for this contingent of elderly?
This issue invites you to try on another view of the world: to see it from the time scale of a kauri, through the nose of a dog, and with the eyes of fellow humans who experience disasters on a daily basis.

This issue of New Zealand Geographic went to print almost 20 years to the day after a science-fiction film by a young screenwriter and director from Paraparaumu opened in cinemas in the United States. It envisaged a future where people are genetically engineered, creating an upper class of physically ‘superior’ humans and an underclass of ordinary people whose parents couldn’t afford to tweak their DNA.
Gattaca was Andrew Niccol’s first film. It bombed at the box office, but has since acceded to the rank of a classic. In 2012, it topped NASA’s list of the “most-realistic” science fiction films ever made. I was dubious about paying a return visit to its vision of the future, but I discovered that Gattaca has barely aged: its concerns about genetic engineering are the same ones we are still facing today. Since 1997, we haven’t come any closer to answering the question: If we can edit our DNA, where do we draw the line between the eradication of disease and the improvement of other physical qualities?
We can’t wait another 20 years to decide. Since 2012, we’ve all of a sudden become really, really good at editing genes. Though we’ve been able to tinker with DNA for decades, only recently has it become possible to make very precise changes very quickly. That’s because the tools are different: we’re using a scalpel rather than an excavator claw. The technology described in Kate Evans’s story is going to dramatically reshape the world around us.
So we need to make up rules for how we will use it, and fast. Trouble is, the technology for editing genes—known as CRISPR—has outstripped our understanding of genes themselves.
“A geneticist said to me, ‘It feels like we’re building the plane as we’re flying it’,” said ethicist Josephine Johnston, at a public talk in Auckland about gene editing.
Data deficiency is a bit of a theme in this issue of the magazine. We don’t know very much about whitebait, except that we’re probably on the cusp of losing them, and we’ll need to make a number of decisions in the absence of complete data if we want to be scoop-netting them every spring for the next 20 years.
Nor do we know very much about what lives in the vast blue expanse of our territorial seas, or how our actions impact those species, yet we will increasingly be called to make decisions that affect them.
We cannot let the unknown prevent us from taking action. As Jennifer Doudna, the first person to demonstrate how CRISPR works, said of the tool she helped invent: “People will use the technology whether we know enough about it or not.”
One place to begin is to address the values that we, as a society, hold close. When we lack data about the species in the world around us, we make decisions—such as decisions to learn more—based on those values.
Concerns over gene editing causing discrimination against certain people or characteristics exist because those attributes are already discriminated against. Gattaca’s gene-edited humans are tall and strong and healthy and beautiful because we’re biased against the sick, the weak, the short, the ugly.
Social views dictate our use of science, not the other way around, and we should begin any decision-making process by taking a careful, open-minded look at our values and the shape of the society that we want.

We have five parakeet species that we can call our own. One lives in the subantarctic, one on the Chathams, and three on the mainland—red, yellow and orange. If you’ve visited a sanctuary, you might have heard their chattering and glimpsed a flash of lime green in the understorey. You might have even got close enough to tell what you were looking at—to see the red mask over their eyes, or a yellow stripe rising over their heads like a mohawk.
You probably didn’t see an orange-fronted parakeet—and you’d be able to tell by the pumpkin-coloured band above their beak—because orange-fronts are in a terrific amount of trouble. We’re not very good at protecting them, and it’s not for want of trying.
The Department of Conservation has already attempted the interventions that have worked for other species. DOC kills more than 95 per cent of the predators that roam the forest valleys in Canterbury that the orange-fronts call home. A sanctuary breeds the birds in safety, then they’re released on offshore islands, where, free from threat, the birds fail to thrive.
Today, the orange-fronted parakeet is widely described as “stuffed”.
It looks likely that the destruction of the parakeets’ habitat is driving their decline, and that’s difficult to fix. Whatever the orange-fronted parakeets require has been lost, and we can’t recreate it for them because we don’t know what it was. Perhaps the layer of the forest that they prefer to browse has been stripped by deer and goats. Perhaps their preferred food is no longer available, and, added to all the other environmental changes they have faced in the last century, they can’t cope.
DOC lists about 2700 threatened and at-risk species, in varying degrees of trouble. Some of those are clawing back ground—record breeding seasons of takahē, kākāpō, kiwi and whio being among the success stories.
But some native wildlife does not have a good prognosis, and this issue’s story on orange-fronted parakeets will be the first in a series examining the fauna most at risk of being lost without dramatic intervention. Keep an eye on nzgeo.com/curtain-call.
These species are diverse, but have one thing in common—our one-size-fits-all backup strategy doesn’t work for them. We rely on being able to rescue endangered wildlife by sequestering breeding pairs on predator-free islands. But the species in our curtain call all have habitat requirements that those islands can’t provide.
Some of these species might surprise you. Some of them seem numerous now, but their population is in freefall. Some of them you have probably never seen in the wild, but you may have heard their calls, or eaten them for lunch.
We look to the Predator Free 2050 moonshoot as the universal saviour of our threatened species, but evidence shows that the orange-fronted parakeet’s problems don’t all have four legs and a stomach. It would be concerning if support for a wide range of conservation services—research, habitat restoration, ecosystem preservation—is withdrawn in favour of predator eradication.
And in the case of the orange-fronts, a predator-free mainland won’t make a difference.
Either we fund the research and intensive care the parakeet requires, or witness this long goodbye, where conservation staff have just enough resources to try, but not quite enough to make a difference.

This issue’s cover posed a challenge: to present cannabis in a way that was recognisable, but that didn’t immediately call to mind a number of associations. An image of a cannabis leaf has layers of meaning attached to it. We wanted to make it possible for readers to take a fresh look.
We are, as a nation, taking a fresh look at cannibis. Last year a survey found that nearly two-thirds of us didn’t have a problem with people using it for fun, and even more people thought it should be available for medical purposes.
As with alcohol, we seem to be happy to leave the risk calculation up to the individual. (I think my dad summed up the views of those two-thirds of New Zealanders quite well: “You should be free to misuse your body however you like.”)
In another survey, most people said that of all New Zealand’s environmental features, rivers and lakes were the worst-managed—and two-thirds of people believed dairy farming to be the culprit. In other words, we shouldn’t be free to misuse land however we like. We shouldn’t be allowed to spread certain substances on the nation’s pastures.
Less management of cannabis, please, and more of freshwater.
Our social views change slowly enough that the government ought to be able to keep up. On these issues, it hasn’t.
As we begin to value things differently, the costs of them change, too. Since European settlers arrived in New Zealand, the nation’s waterways have been treated as a pre-fabricated sewage network—put it in the river, and the river carries it away.
We don’t want to use our rivers in this manner anymore, but the primary sector has been caught by surprise at the change—not to mention the need to invent a brand-new nationwide nutrient-drainage system from scratch. As Kennedy Warne describes in his story on rivers, agriculture and environmental tipping points on page 36, a large group of scientists are working on this problem, but the solutions aren’t free or easy.
Animal-derived foods cost more than the price we pay for them, and our waterways pay the difference. We can remove this cost from our lakes and rivers if we take it on ourselves, but the size of the issue means that it can’t be left to individual decision-making—regulation is required.
Meanwhile, our other value change is looking better for the nation’s bottom line. Treasury has already done the maths on the revenue it stands to gain via GST and company taxes on legalised cannabis—and it’s in the hundreds of millions. Not to mention the potential savings to police of no longer enforcing prohibition.
Costs, returns, values—it is a complex public equation, but I invite you to open this issue and make a fresh calculation with an open mind.

When it rains, it’s very quiet on Tiritiri Matangi, except for the white-noise pattering on the canopy. When the shower passes over, there’s a pause in the forest, like a singer taking a breath before her first note, and then it begins: the fluting of korimako, the buzz of a stitchbird, the propeller-like whirr of a kereru flapping heavily through the canopy.
Ahead of me, there’s an unfamiliar chuckling, and a heavy grey shadow on a branch.
I’ve walked hundreds of kilometres through New Zealand’s national parks and visited some of the country’s remotest spots, but I’ve never seen a kōkako. There are two right here—a minute’s walk from the wharf, an hour’s ferry ride from the middle of Auckland city—gently murmuring at each other, hopping from tree to tree. The black mask over their eyes makes them look like old-fashioned bank robbers, or guests at a masquerade ball.
I grew up on one side of the Waitematā, and now I live on the other. I’ve spent almost my entire life in Auckland, but this is my first visit to Tiritiri. The island is, according to TripAdvisor, Auckland’s number one tourist attraction.
I’m delighted that it hasn’t been developed by a tourism company, but rather by an army of weekend warriors who have spent the last couple of decades planting hundreds of thousands of trees, transforming the island from empty farmland to a well-stocked bird sanctuary.
Volunteers still do most of the work. The weekend I visit, a group is rebuilding a washed-out trail, and another dozen are tour guides, explaining the ecology and history of the island to small groups of visitors. The tour fee goes towards the island’s upkeep.
Our volunteer guide, Trish, has a demonstration photo book, so that she can show us kororā when the nesting boxes turn out to be empty, kohekohe flowers when the tree turns out not to be in bloom, and a little bag of pohutukawa seeds so that we can see how tiny they are. When my friend asks her about the difference between mānuka and kānuka, she’s thrilled, and whips out a botanical illustration.
Some tourists, she says, book their Tiritiri tour before their flights to New Zealand, and it’s the first thing they do—an early-morning arrival at the airport and they’re on the island by 10.15am. Tiritiri is the first impression we make.
Nowadays we’re used to hearing about the environment in a state of perpetual decline, but Tiritiri is an example of the opposite: we came, we saw, we conquered, we regretted, we restored.
In some places, we’re getting closer to the end of the trajectory than the start. There are so many Archey’s frogs—an IUCN Red List species—in a six-kilometre-square area of Whareorino that researchers have to be careful not to stand on them during monitoring. When urban streams are ‘daylighted’ in Auckland—opened to the air, rather than funnelled through concrete pipes—eels return as the streams’ health improves.
And in those places where restoration and recovery are not within the Department of Conservation’s budget—as Tiritiri wasn’t—they remain within our capability to improve, as Tiritiri was. Someone had to stick the first spade in the ground at Tiri, plant the first plant, release the first bird.

How many moa were there before the human settlement of Aotearoa? “We don’t know,” came the emphatic answer from the experts consulted for this issue. Estimates ranged from thousands of moa, to millions—though the higher end of the range was dismissed as “bollocks” in the carefully chosen words of one scientist.
Why do whales strand? “Well… it’s complicated. There’s a range of contributing factors.”
Simple questions can have complicated answers, and the popular image of science as a realm of orderly ideas and binary responses usually underestimates the complexity and tangled nature of problems that modern researchers are attempting to solve. Sometimes, there are thousands of variables, not the single cause-and-effect relationship of Newtonian physics.
Which is what makes the Earth System Model—described by Naomi Arnold in this issue—such an audacious idea. It’s founded on the principle that every natural system and relationship can be described mathematically, and if you have rules that describe all of them—and a super-computer at your disposal—you can construct the perfect model of the planet, and demonstrate order within the apparent chaos. Not every process of this planet is fully understood, but the model will also serve to highlight those gaps in our understanding—the Southern Ocean being the largest missing piece in our region—and gradually resolve and refine it.
Ultimately, this mathematical world will become the researchers’ play-thing. Like setting up a model train set, they will be able to re-route the tracks, build new tracks, and determine the route of the model train in order to understand how the real train might behave given different scenarios.
Making sense of a complex world is the work of an Earth System Model, and for 55 issues editing New Zealand Geographic, asking simple questions and presenting the complicated answers in a compelling way has been my job too. For more than half of that period I have also been the magazine’s publisher, and now the moment has come to spend more time setting the direction of the title, and doubling-down in our efforts in the digital realm.
I will still be involved with the print edition as a photo editor, but from next issue the editor’s torch will be passed to Rebekah White, currently deputy editor, award-winning former editor of Pro Photographer and frequent feature writer for this magazine—including in this edition. She is only the fourth in New Zealand Geographic’s relay of editors, and I know that she will bring the freshness of a new runner—a vibrant new voice and a new approach as the magazine approaches its third decade.
Occupying this chair is a role I have cherished. Working with contributors to imagine a story, being the first person to read a freshly minted text, or receiving the first samples of a photographer’s work—sometimes sent direct from the field—has been a sublime privilege. Witnessing the magic moment when the text first touches the pictures on the designer’s screen, and watching the visual and textual narratives become entangled has probably been my greatest reward. And I trust this position will afford Rebekah as much satisfaction as it has me; even as she works to deliver insights and delights to you, in print and online.
As for me, my mission remains the same—to give readers experiences that allow them to see New Zealand in a new way; to shed old mind-sets and build new notions of what this country is and could be. For the large and growing number of readers of this title, the future is full of possibility.

Every other week I go for a long run through bush close to our house in the Auckland suburb of Birkenhead. Much of it is dominated by towering macrocarpas, but as I scramble up the trail that runs along the edge of Duck Creek, the thin understorey of ponga becomes more dense and diverse, the natives become larger, and at the head of a valley in the comparatively new suburb of Chatswood, I find myself surrounded by giants.
Four kauri form a copse, rising like Apollo rockets from the undergrowth. I can get my arms about half way around the trunks of three of them, the other, not even close.
I lean back on a perfunctory wooden seat and stare upward, the trees tilting toward a common vanishing point high above. Tūī clatter and whirr through the canopy.
A core sample taken by University of Canterbury researcher Dave Norton suggests that the largest—1.7 metres in diameter—is about 475 years old. That’s not particularly old as large kauri go, but it pre-dates the arrival of Tasman by a century. It stood here throughout the tumultuous period of European settlement, and survived the kauri timber industry that enabled the construction of the colony. While its brethren were felled to provide the weatherboards and floors for my house, built some time before 1900, the Armed Constabulary were sacking Parihaka—a story of injustice barely mentioned in the public history of this country, but now recounted in detail in this issue.
But these trees can do better than stand mute in the presence of history; they are living barographs of natural events, as Kate Evans investigates in her feature ‘Buried Treasure’. Ancient kauri provide a continuous climate record back 4500 years, and a more disconnected record back to the limit of radiocarbon dating 60,000 years ago.
Ironically, the science benefits directly from the commercial extraction of swamp kauri, a resource being exported as ‘tabletops’ and ‘temple poles’ to international buyers, echoing the complex politics that has divided Northland. Is swamp kauri worth more in the ground or out of it? Are our remnant forests more valuable dead or alive? How do we begin to value these things when our sense of value is coloured so greatly by our perspective?
This is the same question posed by ecologist Jamie Steer, profiled on page 28, who is being accused of conservation heresy. His suggestion that introduced species are as valuable and relevant a part of our ecosystem as natives has raised the ire of those whose focus is on eradicating them. He’s not committing scientific treason, he says, simply forwarding an opinion that “opens up the conversation”.
What can we learn from controversial conservation ideas? What can we learn from logs buried for aeons in metres of peat? What can we learn from the long-obscured story of Parihaka?
For Andrew Judd, former mayor of Taranaki, learning about the events at Parihaka was life-changing. When he was elected, he had “no knowledge of the Treaty, no true knowledge of our past, no understanding or empathy towards Māori. I was wrong, I was ignorant and arrogant,” he said in a candid interview on RNZ recently.
New Zealanders pay lip service to the Treaty and are blind to its privilege, he said. “We do a haka at a rugby match, we sing the national anthem in both languages and think we’ve hit the mark . . . It’s archaic, and it has to change, because it’s not working.”
New perspective is powerful. It can recalibrate one’s sense of reality, even reset the course of a nation. Like Judd, facing history’s inconvenient truths, acknowledging nature’s evolving complexity, reconciling the relative values of temple poles and taonga are among those difficult processes that are tempting to ignore, but in addressing them we will start a new and enlightening conversation for everyone.

A parcel arrived today, one that I had ordered so long ago I had nearly forgotten about it. Inside, nestled within volumes of packing material, was a single feather. It’s black, and broad, and the top quarter of the feather is brilliant white to the tip.
Except that it’s not a feather. It’s made of ceramic, a giant-sized plaster replica of a feather belonging to a huia, a bird that was hunted to extinction more than a century ago—a bird gone so long that the shape and shade of its plumage are now a totem that powerfully signifies all that modernity abandoned and destroyed in this archipelago. For me, however, it also represents everything that makes New Zealand unique, and everything that still remains here.
Kākāpō, for instance, a bird that probably should not be here at all. The mechanisms of its absurd mating behaviour, and lack of success therein, should have been at odds poor enough to guarantee its relegation to the annals of pre-history. The kākāpō’s unique lack of preparedness for mammalian predators should have sealed its fate completely, if it were not for the precipitous hanging valleys of Fiordland, and the rugged outcrop of Stewart Island. At one point in the 1990s, the total population was barely 50 individuals.
On this tender genetic thread hung the future of the entire species. For four decades, conservationists have focused on the fortunes of the remaining individuals, increasing the population to 155. Today, as deputy editor Rebekah White reveals in this issue, scientists have turned their attention back to that frail genetic thread, analysing it in cross-section to reveal the fabric of the kākāpō genome, and the specific genes of every kākāpō in the population, to breed the population back to health.
The new knowledge has already led to one of the most successful breeding seasons ever, which researchers hope will be enough to ensure the kākāpō won’t go the way of the South Island kōkako, which may now be lost forever, despite the ongoing search detailed in the May–June issue. (North Island kōkako, too, had a close shave, with only the intervention of vigilante conservationists to save them in 1978—examined in Andrea Graves’ new Currency column on page 21.)
It was all too late, however, for the huia—though it may yet be saved, even a century after the fact.
In a 2002 paper published in the journal Common Ground, palaeobiologist Jeffrey Yule mounted a philosophical argument to restore species using genetic cloning of viable DNA that meet a very narrow band of criteria—that they were driven to extinction by humans; that the extinction occurred very recently; that the habitat is present to support a wild population; and that scientific effort in cloning extinct species does not distract from the effort to conserve species still extant.
Yule singled out New Zealand’s huia, Australia’s thylacine and North America’s passenger pigeon as examples that fit the criteria for ‘ethical’ cloning. (He even quoted a—now defunct—international university project to revive the huia that had already secured the support of the manawhenua, Ngāti Huia.)
So while the plaster feather now swinging from a nail on my wall echoes a distant past, it may also represent a distant future.
“Cloning could provide the means to not only correct specific past mistakes,” writes Yule, “but also the opportunity to demonstrate to a too-often-dispirited public that it is still within our power to repair some of what we have so carelessly broken.”
Genetic technology is rapidly bringing us into a brave new era of conservation biology, for better or for worse.

Since the first search engine, ‘Archie’ crawled through cyberspace in September 1990, the world has been enthralled with searching—for information, for images, for ideas—within the vast library of the internet. Today, the search engine Google is the world’s second-most valuable company, and easily the most visited website. Searching is actually more popular than any of the search results served.
It has always been the way. A pilgrimage is an end unto itself, and the notion of enlightenment as a journey of self-discovery is the foundation of many religions. For some, the journey is to a holy site, but for most, the end point is irrelevant—devotees seek out inspiration in the desert, in the mountains, in the wilderness. The journey is the destination.
In his essay on wilderness areas in this issue, Carl Walrond quotes American author and ecologist Aldo Leopold, who believed that wilderness is a “counterpoint to the ennui of the modern world, a tonic against striving ‘for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life and dullness’.”
Like those seeking spiritual enlightenment, we go into the wilderness for a more primal experience. The journey embodies “remoteness, discovery, challenge, freedom and romance,” to quote the lyrical wording of the Wilderness Policy 1985. It’s probably no coincidence that these values match the unstated ideals of New Zealand identity: independence, egalitarianism, adventure, self-sufficiency, an affinity with nature and the ability to withstand hardship.
Rhys Buckingham knows something about hardship in the outdoors: he has spent the better part of his life chasing the echo of a lost song through the forest, looking for a bird that had been considered extinct for nearly half a century. He believes he has heard the sad, lilting call of the South Island kōkako in the forests of Murchison, Otago and South Westland. He’s detected what he thinks are signs of their browsing on the forest floor, and even believes he’s seen the shimmering slate-grey plumage of the bird soaring through the forest canopies of Stewart Island and Fiordland.
He knows that the probability of finding kōkako in the South Island is small, but is adamant that it is not zero. On the balance of evidence, the Department of Conservation seems to agree, and in 2013 changed the bird’s designation from ‘extinct’ to ‘data-deficient’. History would agree too—searchers found the takahē, the kākāpō, the New Zealand storm petrel; all believed extinct at the time they were rediscovered, against tremendous odds.
In a sense, Buckingham is not looking for a lost bird at all, but a lost world.
“One of the tragedies is that most New Zealanders walk through the bush and think that what they see and hear is normal,” South Island Kōkako Trust chariman Euan Kennedy told the author of our story, Kate Evans. “All of us in our trade know that it is far from normal—that what were once great cathedrals of song, are now deadly silent.”
Yet they're not about to give up, perhaps acknowledging that the search itself has a meaning of its own. Looking for that lost world, anticipating a better ending, wishing for a more complete New Zealand is surely the first step to achieving it.
Will we find the South Island kōkako? I don’t know, but like Buckingham, I’d prefer to believe that’s still there, haunting our forests, avoiding human contact, singing its siren song, to be heard only by those who go in search.

This is my 50th issue at the helm of New Zealand Geographic, though familiarity with the job hasn’t made it any easier. The better I understand the forces acting on this place and its people, the more complex and interesting our shared story becomes.
It’s an arcane ecology, with a strange cargo of life and a short but explosive human history.
I’ve been stirred by the analysis of writers and photographers who have forced me to reconsider my assumptions and prejudices on a bimonthly basis. And I’ve come to realise how many of the ideas that we unconsciously adopt—and then fiercely defend—are founded on very contestable facts.
Everything that makes our environment unique became the matching criteria for its failure when circumstances changed. It’s hard to reconcile the myth of that pristine and unusual archipelago—infamously branded 100% Pure—with the tale of the fastest deforestation on Earth, or data that reveals that our rivers are among the most polluted in the world.
In the past few years, we have published stories that confront these flawed notions, and challenge our assumptions about our society, too: Our founding document meant different things to the parties who signed it, and was pre-dated by an earlier declaration that sheds light on those very different intentions.
With every issue I am reminded that this country is not what we think it is, and we are not who we think we are.
In this issue is another reality check: we discovered that one per cent of the adult population are using methamphetamine, a destructive psychoactive drug now more readily available than marijuana. Last issue, we put a cute baby kiwi on the cover, and it sold like hot cakes. This issue, we’ve got a junkie smoking a meth pipe, and the marketing manager’s face fell about a foot. News like this doesn’t sell well. It’s not the reflection we want of ourselves—but it’s the truth nonetheless.
Recently we’ve produced unpopular stories on waste, homelessness, poaching and sea-level rise, because they’re important. They’re forces that are changing the shape of New Zealand and New Zealanders. We have received equal measure of praise and criticism for highlighting these uncomfortable realities, including the complaint that such stories aren’t “recreational reading”—presumably the kind of material that leaves one’s prejudices unruffled.
Observations. Values. Judgements. These are how we form a view of ourselves and our nation, and they shape our responses to challenge and opportunity. This is a publishing ideology set in motion from the first issue in 1989, and three editors have maintained it across 139 issues, which now loom large on an enormous shelf over my desk.
Today, that great archive exists in another realm, too. Six years of effort and the generosity of magazine contributors have resulted in a complete redux of the New Zealand Geographic website, nzgeo.com, which now features every story ever published—more than a quarter-century of insight and endeavour by hundreds of New Zealand’s leading writers and photographers. In addition, the world-leading television production company NHNZ (formerly Natural History New Zealand) has joined the platform, contributing its entire back-catalogue of programming—hundreds of hours of natural history documentaries—for a new streaming television service available at nzgeo.tv. Together, the combined catalogues represent one of the largest and richest bodies of New Zealand content available anywhere.
This new endeavour positions New Zealand Geographic as one of the leading voices in the online conversation, just as it has been part of the discourse in printed media for decades. I hope it will be a place where we can continue to be stirred by new versions of the New Zealand story, what I now realise is a story without end—a bimonthly process of redefining who we are and where we’re from.